All this and more!

 

 

 

 

 

 

My choice of food for the birthday meal in the chosen restaurant was a ‘bocadillo classico’ of chorizo, morcilla (black pudding sausage) and cheese.  And it was tastily spicy, though a little dry, so I added mayonnaise.  The restaurant owner was delighted that I chose something so traditional and everyone else was horrified that I had chosen something so laden with cholesterol!  I have to admit, in spite of the hypocrisy of people questioning my choice while themselves have fatty alternatives, the roll was one of the tastiest that I have had for years.

     The delightfully indulgent theme was continued in the birthday cake that was a chocolate sponge with orange mousse cream, coated in chocolate with the topping of fresh fruit.  Utterly delicious!  The only restraint I showed was in my non-alcoholic beer – and that was purely on medical advice, and not, I hasten to add, in any way my free choice!

     The curfew has now ended, but we did not come back to Castelldefels much later than usual and, as I am now used to going to bed hours earlier than I used to, I was tired when we got home and soon went to bed.

 

There, the foregoing shows that I am capable of writing about something other than Covid and politics, though you will notice that the ‘curfew’ did manage to make an appearance.

 

Part of the fall-out from Toni’s birthday concerns his presents.  I bought him a pair of wireless ear buds to listen to the radio on his phone when he goes for his daily walk but you will be astonished to hear, they have not paired easily with the phone.

     I have yet to get a pair of wireless ear buds that have paired in the ‘automatic’ way that they should.  Much the same goes for smart watches seamlessly pairing with smartphones – ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, rather than anything remotely related to reality.  However, perseverance and a few fugitive tears usually manage to get the necessary results.

     As Toni is of the “why do I need the instructions?” generation, he is usually more intuitively sensitive to the petulant demands of electronic equipment than I, but at present he is claiming major mechanical failure to explain his almost complete lack of success in getting the ear buds to work.  I say ‘almost’ because he has got the ear buds to work, but not both at the same time.  The buds have not spoken or paired with each other – and I have nothing to suggest to resolve the situation.  Eventually, Toni will work out some sort of resolution, but at the moment he is frustrated and generally dismissive of the whole affair.  But it will nag at his technical reputation and he will get them working.  Probably.

The weather recently has not been wonderful; indeed the weather has not been sunnily acceptable for months.  I endured a lacklustre April on the assurance (an explicit assurance by Toni) that the misery of dull days would give way to a brilliantly sun-lit May.  And that has signally not happened.

 

And has still not happened and this is now some days later.  Although it is not raining, it has been trying hard to do so and generally unsettling the sunshine that should be pouring down on us.  But I have faith that the good sunny days are but days away.

 

I hate, have hated, and will always hate the wearing of glasses.  They put pressure in all the wrong facial places and steam up and slip and are generally hateful.  Since I was eighteen I have worn contact lenses, and, as I started wearing them in the hard-plastic era then those of my generation will know that the discomfort of glasses is as nothing to a speck of dust getting behind a lens.

     As I do a lot of reading and typing, it is generally better for me to wear neither glasses nor contact lenses for the best reading experience.  Typing is a little more difficult, but on the computer it is easy to increase the size of the type to accommodate my poor sight and then reduce it to normal size when printing.

     However, from time to time I get fed up with lenses and revert to glasses in spite of my antipathy, and for the last number of months I have worn my glasses.

     I had to visit the optician because of the ill fit of the glasses – to be absolutely fair, this was probably because I have left them on my leg (!) while reading and it is inevitable that some pressure damage will result from complete lack of care.

     Although my optician does such running repairs for nothing, he was obviously missing my injection of cash that the wearing of daily contact lenses brought him from me on a regular basis.  In a discussion about why I wasn’t wearing my lenses, I pointed out that I need varifocal lenses in my glasses to cope with my long and short sightedness.  He was not fazed and said that a new type of varifocal lens was available if I would care to try it.  Never one to reject the spending of money (free trial is never really ‘free’, even I know that) I agreed to give them a go.

     Now, I did go through a period when my optician in Cardiff tried to change my lenses to something more suited to my variable sight. 

     One of the failed experiments was to make each of my eyes do a different job: the left was for reading and the right was for distance.  Or possibly the other way around.  Whatever.  I was told that my brain would sort out the conflicting information and would ‘choose’ the appropriate eye for the task.  It didn’t.

     I also had a bi-focal lens to try too.  That failed entirely as I couldn’t see well at distances and reading was a total disaster.

     So, my agreement to try the lenses has failure built into the experience.  To make matters much, much worse, the lenses were monthly wear rather than the daily wear that I had become used to.

     I have to admit that I never, truly, looked after my lenses properly, so a daily lens that you could insert in the morning and throw away at night seemed ideal for me, and they were soft and easy on the eye too.

     It has only been a few days with the new lenses and I have to admit that I am impressed.  So far.  I have not seen a lens through its life yet, so judgement must be reserved, but they are comfortable and although my sight is not perfect, it does allow me to read, type and see with some clarity.

     People with poor eyesight are prepared to put up with a lot.  You only have to look at the outer surface of a confirmed glasses wearer and note the number of smears, splodges and specks of dirt to be impressed by how many obstructions to clear sight we are able to take in our stride.

     The privations of contact lens wearers are usually epic.  A contact lens wearer will have harrowing stories of pain, loss and miracle that will make non-contact lens wearers doubt their probity, but all those stories are true!  We wear our tales as badges of endurance under tiny bits of plastic!

     It is far too soon to accept these new lenses as anything other than a promising experiment, but it is only when you have experienced the gradual increasing loss of sight through the years, that you will be able to understand the amount of blind (ha!) faith that lens wearers put in each innovation to make their sight sharper.

     My optician assures me that I am now wearing the very latest technology and that the improvements of the lenses from similar ones of only a year ago are remarkable.  Who am I to say?  But I hope he’s right and I further hope that the continuing streams of money that I pay will be justified in clear sight.

 

One side effect of not wearing glasses means that I can wear other glasses.  This is to do with my bike riding.

     Unprotected eyes, even at my gentle speeds, means that all sorts of detritus come smashing onto the eyeball.  Wearing glasses acts as a shield for the various irritations, especially tiny insects, that generally interfere with smooth riding.  So bike glasses were needed.  Which I have.  Somewhere.

      The Royal Hunt of the Eye Protectors eventually unearthed (not literally) some goggles that I had bought on Kickstarter.  The USB of these was they had a Bluetooth connection to my mobile phone and used bone conduction behind the ear to allow sound to come through, but still allowing ambient sounds to flow into unobstructed ears.  As far as my understanding of the traffic rules is concerned, in-ear buds are banned when you are cycling, but bone conduction variants are possibly allowed.  Certainly.  I think.

     I have used them once and listened to a fairly hard-hitting interview on the Today Programme (Radio 4) with a British Conservative minister trying to justify the absurd illogicality of the Covid rules regarding a worrying outbreak of the Indian Variant of Covid and allowing a crowd into a football stadium.  An embarrassing melange of words from the hapless minister did not hide the paucity of thought behind the non-policy of criminally culpable Conservatives.  So the glasses worked.  Frighteningly well.

     The battery life on the glasses is allegedly 6 hours, and other reviews have said that they hold their charge well.

     The only down side was the necessity of changing the visor from a muddy brown to a professional looking blue.  It was not a task that we (it took two of us) will repeat: the visor that is there now stays there.  For ever.  And I am inclined to write a scathing comment on the YouTube film of one reviewer who said, “Changing the lens is easy” and then DID NOT DEMONSTRATE how to do it, merely giving a vague indication of “pinching here and the lens will pop out” – lies and deceit!  However it is done and it adds a touch of professionalism to my altogether sit-up-and-beg style of stolid cycling.

 

Talking of which, where is my new bike?

     I had been warned that its delivery would take about 32 working days (an oddly specific number) but the bike seems to be stubbornly stuck in Poland after having been sent by train (is that likely?) from Hong Kong.  It is now getting to the stage of contacting my contact in the company and asking plaintive questions.

     Oddly enough, the reason for purchasing the new bike has become less moot.  I was having difficulty in dismounting from the vehicle and decided that I needed a ‘walk through’ version to accommodate my lessening agility.  However, I have developed ways of getting on and off the bike that suit my needs.  Furtherly however, I think that the new bike will be short-term-future-proofed.  Or that is what I am telling myself to justify the expense.  As the money has already been paid, it is just a matter of wanting to get my hands on what is mine already.

     I will try the web site again and perhaps things (including my bike) will have moved on.

    I live in hope!

  

 

Surprise yourself!

 

You are never too old for a first time.


I suppose I should let that opening line just rest, alone. Let the sense of it be found in the individual sensibility of the invidual reading it. But that is not my way. Where there is an introduction there is writing!


The first, ‘first’ of the last few days was with food. I pride myself on being my mother’s son as far as things culinary go. She was prepared to try virtually anything, up to and including cheese that had to be stunned with a hammer before it could be eaten. Her love of pungent cheese I have come to understand, but one food stuff that she enjoyed, I still find difficult: tripe.


That last word is not a comment, it is a food stuff. The stomach lining of cows. It looks revolting and tastes worse. My mother cooked it in chunks with onions in milk and water and kept saying how delicious it was while my father and I looked on in horror. Neither of us was ever tempted to try what looked like surgical waste.


In Spain tripe is called callos, and in Madrid it is the signature tapa of the city (Catalans might say ‘exactly!’) and can be found in sandwiches even. Usually, however, callos are served as bits in a sauce.


As my mother’s son I felt that the time had arrived for me to try and break another frontier and try them. In the past there was the occasion where four of us visited Madrid and decided to try the signature tapa only to find when the thing actually arrived three of my companions refused even to try the dish. And I gave up after a few mouthfuls.


So, in theory, I was open to try callos again, but not go out of my way to order them. Luckily the number of times that callos features on a menu del dia in these parts is limited and so my theoretical indulging could remain hypothetical rather than real. Until the inevitable happened and callos appeared on a menu and I decided the time had come – and there would be another two courses to take the taste away (to say nothing of the wine) if I didn’t like them.

They were served with chickpeas (gabanzos) small chunks of chorizo and unidentifiable bits of fat-wrapped pig bone all in a sauce.

I took my first taste with a certain amount of trepidation and a half empty spoon and, even with the rather slimily textured slide of the first piece of tripe down my questioning throat, I realized that my genetic background was going to allow me to (even) ‘enjoy’ this first course and, as the last of the pictures in this little series will prove, I managed to finish my dish – with the exception of the inedible parts that were only there for flavouring. Job well done.

Though to be entirely frank, the other starter choices on any future menu del dia will have to be startling awful before I chose callos again, but I have eaten them and with what could be describe as something approaching relish. And if that sounds like fairly qualified approbation, well, it is.


The second first, so to speak, comes by virtue of accompanying a friend to the local Chinese supermarket for sundries. I went there for nothing and came out with three glass jars, an illuminated rose tree, a set of bubble multi coloured lights and, my first, an illuminated star.


Now I have bought illuminated stars at this time of the year before as I am a great believer in the pure vulgarity of the decorative holiday season of Christmas. I am not a fan of those who produce tastefully decorated homes by restricting the colour palette to two primary colours or just black and white or any variation thereof. Excess is never enough in my opinion.


So, this star is for putting in the window. I know that Cardiff is the home of the illuminated house and garden near the roundabout where over-kill Christmas Lights is given its concrete (if you can say that about light) manifestation – but I was never a fan. But am now. If only with a single multi-coloured, flashing piece of vulgarity. And I love it!


Our part of Castelldefels is hardly enthusiastic about Christmas decorations, and even the municipality is, shall we say, undemonstrative on our particular part of the beach. You have to look long and hard to see any signs of Christmas here. But not now, thanks to the power of LED lights our single star blazes out jollifying the whole of our section of the street!

The star is in the kitchen window facing the road and is at first floor level. On the ground floor you can see through to the back garden, the front part of which is filled with various forms of solar light, so coming back home at night can be a fairly shocking, though intensely satisfying experience, at least to me a confirmed light lover!

Tomorrow back to the Liceu and the long haul of Tristan. Although I am the first to admit the beauty of some of the music in this piece, I do find it difficult to regard it as anything but an ordeal. It starts an hour earlier than normal and we still probably won’t get out before midnight!


Perhaps, this will be the occasion when I really get why this opera is regarded as being as transformative as it is in the history of music.


I am reminded of a production of Tristan I saw years ago. It was beautifully sung, but I found it dramatically dead and the staging was minimalistic to the point of utter boredom. Indeed at one point in one the performances that I attended I counted the number of people in the dress circle because it was more interesting than what was happening on stage. During the interval one of my friends fell on a bottle of wine while slipping down stairs (don’t ask) and I volunteered to take her to casualty and miss the rest of the opera. Such selflessness! 

So I have history with this piece.


However, I approach this performance with hope and a reasonably open mind, strong in the faith that I have a more spacious and comfortable seat than I used to have a few years ago when I watched opera from the Upper Levels!


The real trick is to survive rush hour traffic, get to the Opera House with enough time to wash the driving out of your mind and allow the music to fill it!